Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

The Sentry™
Card# MTU-017

While his stats aren’t much bigger than those of the average 7-drop, Sentry’s “Pay ATK” power can drastically hinder an opponent’s attacking options in the late game.
Click here for more

Sealed Pack Building with Alex Brown

Patrick Sullivan

March 18, 2006

With PC Atlanta right around the corner, gamers from all corners of the globe decided to stop by Los Angeles for the $10K before heading off to the big show. Among them is Alex Brown, Australia’s finest VS. player and widely considered the premier theorist in the game today. I had an opportunity to sit down with Alex for his first deck build, both to discuss his opinions on the X-Men Sealed Pack format and to watch one of the best in the game tackle a format considered by many to be the most daunting Sealed Pack format yet.

The first thing I asked Alex is probably the most fundamental question of the format: Teams or Mutations? Alex said the emphasis was still on teams and on hitting your curve, especially in Sealed. Since most of the plot twists are so powerful, and since there are very few unplayable characters, you don’t really have to rely on your Mutation synergies to make your deck manageable. With that in mind, Alex started by laying out his various teams by curve, looking for teams that could fill out his entire curve with little help. The only characters he put into the “unplayable” pile were two Hellfire Club Army 1-drops. Alex had his various 7s laid out, and I asked him about playing 7s in general, since many of the pros I talked to said that the games are all about turn 6. Alex said “In draft, turn 6 is the key, but in Sealed the games still go to turn 7 quite often. It’s really risky to play without 7s, because you are putting a lot of pressure on your 4th turn to win on turn 6.” He decided on playing Brotherhood/X-Men, since those two teams fleshed out his curve almost completely, plus he had both Planet X and X-Men United to help with any characters he decided to splash. The X-Men team-up had Alex particularly excited, since “this format is all about breakthrough and reinforcement.”

After he had the meat of his deck set up, Alex then went to look at his other characters to fill out the rest of his curve. The first character he went to was Scaleface, who Alex described as “awesome, since it’s good on turn 6 and it’s good on turn 7. You just better make sure you win that turn, since you definitely lose the next turn.” Feral also came in, since it doubles as a solid 4- and 5-drop. Next came the plot twists. Alex was a little short on the spectacular pumps that permeate the format, but he did have Special Delivery, which Alex thinks is one of the better plot twists in the format. “Since the attack values are so high and the defense values are so low, it’s really hard to keep guys from getting stunned, and each guy has such a large attack that the smaller characters still have a lot of value in the later turns of the game,” he explained. Alex also laid out a District X to help with his rather stretched Mutation-stamped cards. Alex then went back to his characters to make sure that he had enough energy cards to play Iceman, Deep Freeze and enough Reservists to make The Acolytes consistent. Alex played two copies of Longshot, Hero of Mojoworld, who Alex thinks is “pretty bad; I would rather just have a 3/1” but would help in conjunction with Anne-Marie Cortez since “all the good plot twists in this format seems to cost 2.”

In the end, Alex built an extremely conservative sealed deck, with a lot of characters in hopes of “just hitting my curve and outplaying people.” Alex could have gotten very greedy and added some very powerful Morlock plot twists (Morlock Justice, Bum’s Rush and Retribution) along with some marginal Morlock characters, but in the end elected the safer approach, hoping his solid curve, sparse tricks, and play skill would carry him to the second build.

Alex Brown, first Sealed Pack Build:

Characters